Saturday, Jan. 26, saw about 100 citizens, mostly older and white, fill the Community Auditorium for a discussion on how to make the city more sustainable. At the same time that morning, about 100 people, mostly younger and many of them Latino, turned out at a local elementary school for a workshop on parental involvement.

"Two sets of citizens, each drawn to a worthy program. Each group
conspicuous by their absence at the other's venue and each going their
own way. But does it have to be this way?" the Leader asks.

Leader Opinion Editor George Rede tells how he spent last Friday morning -- hanging out at a local coffee shop and getting to know a cross-section of the city's residents during his once-a-month meet-and-greet called Fourth Friday.

"Email,
message boards and social media give us a wonderful ability to connect
instantaneously, anywhere and anytime," Rede writes. "But there’s still no substitute
for face-to-face conversation, where body language, tone of voice, eye
contact and nuance all come together in a way that makes those exchanges
much richer and memorable than they’d ever be online."

"The Sandy Hook and Clackamas Mall shootings have drawn national
attention to factors that might incite or prevent such horrific acts:
gun laws, mental health care, violent video games," Nandrea observes. "Alongside them,
though, we should be talking about the power of the arts -- and of
literature in particular -- to foster empathy and compassion."

Finally, guest columnist Dan Lucas delves into state and federal statistics in the wake of the Connecticut and Oregon shootings to ask "How safe are Oregon schools?

"We tend to focus on safety in the schools after high profile tragedies, but what about the rest of the time? How safe are our schools when we're not focused on them, when there aren't high profile tragedies to get our attention?"